Steam

Valve says you do not own your Steam games

What sets Valve apart is how matter-of-fact it is about ownership itself. It is the only one to say both "licensed, not sold" and "confers no title or ownership" in consecutive sentences, and it gives the point its own subsection.

But the best evidence on this page is something Valve almost certainly did not intend to hand us. Its agreement uses the phrase "contract of sale" exactly once, and never for a game.

Do you own your Steam games?

No. The Steam Subscriber Agreement grants you a licence to use your games, and says twice in one clause that this is not a sale.

“The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.”

Steam Subscriber Agreement, 2.A

READ IT IN CONTEXT

WHO WROTE THIS, AND HOW FAR TO TRUST IT

Researched and published by Gamakura. Document analysis assisted by AI; every quote is verbatim and checkable against the source and archived snapshot linked beside it. Last verified 16 July 2026.

This is a best effort reading of public documents by people who are not lawyers, and it is not legal advice. We quote exactly and we link every source, and we can still be wrong about what a clause means: a contract term can carry case law, definitions and context that change its effect.

So do not take our word for it. Read the documents yourself using the links on every exhibit, and if a conclusion here matters to a decision you are making, get the advice of an attorney before you rely on it.

V-01 · DECISIVE Steam Subscriber Agreement Last updated April 20, 2026

2.A · General Content and Services License

Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.

OUR READING

Two sentences, back to back, saying the same thing twice in case you missed it. Note the last line of this clause, which we have not highlighted: to use any of it "you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet".

Screenshot of section 2.A on store.steampowered.com, with the quoted phrase highlighted. — Section 2.A on store.steampowered.com, captured 16 July 2026. The highlight is ours. Nothing else was changed.

SOURCE Live on store.steampowered.com Frozen copy, 17 July 2026

V-02 · DECISIVE Steam Subscriber Agreement Last updated April 20, 2026

1.D · Conclusion of agreements

Your order of Hardware constitutes an offer to Valve to conclude a separate contract of sale for the ordered Hardware. Valve accepts your offer by dispatching the Hardware to you.

OUR READING

This is the best proof on the site. Valve knows exactly how to write a sale, and it does write one, for a Steam Deck. The phrase "contract of sale" appears in this agreement only for physical hardware. For games, the same document, the same company and the same checkout say "licensed, not sold".

The difference is not the price and it is not the money changing hands. It is that one of them is a thing and the other is a file. Valve's own lawyers drew that line, and everything Gamakura is building sits on the wrong side of it.

Screenshot of section 1.D on store.steampowered.com, with the quoted phrase highlighted. — Section 1.D on store.steampowered.com, captured 16 July 2026. The highlight is ours. Nothing else was changed.

SOURCE Live on store.steampowered.com Frozen copy, 17 July 2026

V-03 · DECISIVE Steam Subscriber Agreement Last updated April 20, 2026

9.C · Termination by Valve

Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.

OUR READING

Look at ground (a), which nobody quotes. Valve can cancel with no fault on your part whatsoever, simply by deciding to stop offering that Subscription to everyone. You do not have to have done anything.

Screenshot of section 9.C on store.steampowered.com, with the quoted phrase highlighted. — Section 9.C on store.steampowered.com, captured 16 July 2026. The highlight is ours. Nothing else was changed.

SOURCE Live on store.steampowered.com Frozen copy, 17 July 2026

V-04 Steam Subscriber Agreement Last updated April 20, 2026

9.B · Termination by You

However, Subscriptions are not transferable, and even if your access to a Subscription for a particular game or application is terminated, the original activation key will not be able to be registered to any other account, even if the Subscription was obtained in a retail store.

OUR READING

You bought a box. In a shop. With a key printed on a card inside it. It still cannot go to anyone else, ever. This is the sentence that kills the last surviving analogy between a digital game and a physical one.

Screenshot of section 9.B on store.steampowered.com, with the quoted phrase highlighted. — Section 9.B on store.steampowered.com, captured 16 July 2026. The highlight is ours. Nothing else was changed.

SOURCE Live on store.steampowered.com Frozen copy, 17 July 2026

V-05 Steam Subscriber Agreement Last updated April 20, 2026

2.F · Ownership of Content and Services

All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Content and Services and any and all copies thereof, are owned by Valve and/or its or its affiliates’ licensors.

OUR READING

Read the middle of it: "and any and all copies thereof". That includes the copy sitting on the drive inside your own machine, the one you paid for and downloaded. Valve owns that too.

Screenshot of section 2.F on store.steampowered.com, with the quoted phrase highlighted. — Section 2.F on store.steampowered.com, captured 16 July 2026. The highlight is ours. Nothing else was changed.

SOURCE Live on store.steampowered.com Frozen copy, 17 July 2026

What we are not claiming

This page is only worth anything if it survives being checked by someone who wants it to be wrong. So here is where we stop short of the popular version of the argument. Each of these is a claim we could have made and did not, because the documents do not support it.

Does Steam legally call your games subscriptions?

Not quite, and the real answer is worse. Section 1.B defines your games as "Content and Services". "Subscriptions" is Valve's word for something else: the rights to access that content. So Valve is not calling your library a subscription. It is calling your right to reach your library a subscription, which is a more precise description of the same problem.

Does a VAC ban take away your Steam library?

Not according to anything Valve has published. The only consequence stated in the Refund Policy is that "if you have been banned by VAC ... you lose the right to refund that game". Neither the Refund Policy nor the Subscriber Agreement says a VAC ban revokes your licence, removes the title, or touches any other game on the account. The widely repeated version of this is not in the text, and we are not going to repeat it.

Do Valve's terms say you lose your whole library if you are banned?

No, and this one deserves care because the conclusion is right while the citation is not. The agreement never uses the words "library", "entire" or "voided". What it says is that Valve may cancel "your Account or any particular Subscription(s)" (9.C), and separately that "to make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account" (2.A). Put those together and the outcome follows. But it is a conclusion we are drawing in the open, not a sentence Valve wrote, and we will not put it in quotation marks.

Is the licence Valve grants revocable?

In effect, yes. In Valve's words, no such word appears. "Revocable" and "limited" do not occur anywhere in the agreement. What it actually says is that the licence "ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license", which reaches the same place by a different route. If you see "limited, revocable licence" in quotation marks attributed to Valve, someone has paraphrased and then punctuated it as a quote.

Do Valve's terms explain why games get delisted from the store?

No. We checked for this specifically, because the claim circulates: that Valve's terms address expired licensing agreements, DMCA takedowns or payment processor pressure as reasons a title gets pulled. Searching the Subscriber Agreement, the Refund Policy and the Online Conduct Rules for any of those turns up nothing. Delistings for those reasons are real and well reported, but citing Valve's terms for them would be inventing a source.

Every Valve document we read

Dates are as printed on the page. Where a document prints no date we say so, rather than guessing one from a header or a metadata field. Each frozen copy is a snapshot we created on the date shown, so these citations keep working after the next revision.

DOCUMENT	DATE IT CLAIMS	LIVE	FROZEN COPY
Steam Subscriber Agreement Every exhibit on this page comes from here. Two researchers fetched and read it independently and agreed on the text and the date.	Last updated April 20, 2026	store.steampowered.com	17 July 2026
Steam Refund Policy Read for the VAC ban question. It says less than people think, which is itself worth knowing.	Last updated April 23, 2024	store.steampowered.com	17 July 2026
Steam Online Conduct Rules Incorporated into the Subscriber Agreement by reference at 1.B, and the actual source of the fraud and cheating grounds that get misattributed to section 9.	The page prints no date	store.steampowered.com	17 July 2026

It is not just Valve

Sony PlayStation Sony is the only one that tells you the word Buy is meaningless. It is in the Terms of Service, under a heading with the word purchase in it. Nintendo Switch Nintendo says it at every layer: the store, the account and the console. Since May 2025 it is also the bluntest about the hardware: break the licence rules and the console itself can be rendered permanently unusable. Microsoft Xbox Microsoft reaches the same result as Sony without ever telling you. It admits licensed, not sold only in the fine print, then says purchase everywhere a shopper looks and lets you draw your own conclusion. GOG GOG A storefront we genuinely like, and its terms still are not ownership: the same personal licence as everywhere else, no resale, no inheritance. What GOG does differently is let the downloaded files outlive the deal. itch.io itch.io The docs call you an owner and the terms never do: itch.io grants the most generous licence in this report, then routes it through an account, a page and a file it never promises to keep. Even its founder's advice is to download and back up.

THE POINT OF ALL THIS

We are building the one where you own it

Gamakura is a store where buying a game means owning it: yours to keep, to resell, and to still have when the servers go dark. It is not built yet. Raise your hand and help decide how it gets made.

Quick questions. This is the data that gets this moving.

IF WE CROWDFUNDED IT, WOULD YOU TAKE PART?

Yes Maybe No

WHO WOULD YOU TRUST TO FUND THIS? (PICK ANY)

Just us (self-funded) Investors (VC) The players (crowdfunded)

HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT TO HEAR FROM US?

Keep me posted Only when it's ready